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Carbothermal shock enabled facile and fast growth of carbon nanotubes in a second

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Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) hold great promise in many fields because of their unique structures and properties. However, the preparation of CNTs generally involves cumbersome equipment and time-consuming processes. Here, we report an ultra-fast carbothermal shock (CTS) approach for synthesizing CNTs with a simple homemade setup by employing Joule heating of a carbon substrate. Carbonized silk fabric (CSF) loaded with transition metal salts in ethanol solution was used as the substrate, which was treated with a pulse voltage of 40 V for only 50 ms and then covered with uniform CNTs grown with bimetallic alloy catalyst nanoparticles (diameter: ∼ 9 nm). The temperature ramp rate is as high as 105 K/s. The as-obtained sample has a unique fluffy structure similar to the trichobothrium of spiders, endowing it versatile applications such as airflow sensors or air filters. The CTS technique presents an easy-accessible and highly efficient approach for synthesizing CNTs, which may be also applied in synthesizing other nanomaterials.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key Technology R&D Program of China (No. 2020YFA0210702), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21975141).

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  1. Haomin Wang and Huimin Wang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Organic Optoelectronics and Molecular Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Haomin Wang, Huimin Wang, Yong Zhang, Kailun Xia, Zhe Yin, Mingchao Zhang, Xiaoping Liang, Haojie Lu, Shuo Li & Yingying Zhang

  2. Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing Science and Engineering Center for Nanocarbons, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Shuchen Zhang & Jin Zhang

Authors
  1. Haomin Wang
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  2. Huimin Wang
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  4. Yong Zhang
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  11. Jin Zhang
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Correspondence to Yingying Zhang.

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Wang, H., Wang, H., Zhang, S. et al. Carbothermal shock enabled facile and fast growth of carbon nanotubes in a second. Nano Res. 15, 2576–2581 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3762-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3762-8

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